Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

THE GREATEST SORROW

Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness 2001

Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del

tempo felice ne la miseria.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall

our times of joy in wretchedness.

ON JULY 27 this year, landing in Colombo's Katunayake airport, I saw at first hand how fragile a machine an aircraft is. My plane landed on a runway that was flanked with wreckage on either side. Through the scarred glass of my window, I spotted a blackened pile of debris that ended in the intact tail section of a plane. The shape of the vanished fuselage was etched into the tarmac like the outline of a cigar that has burned itself slowly to extinction, leaving its ring standing in its ashes. Then there was another and still another, the charred remains lying scattered around the apron like a boxful of half-smoked Havanas arranged around the edges of an ebony table.

It was just four days since a small suicide squad of Tamil Tiger guerrillas had succeeded in entering Colombo's carefully guarded Katunayake airport. The strike was executed with meticulous precision, and the guerrillas had destroyed some fourteen aircraft, virtually disabling Sri Lanka's civilian and military air fleets. It was till then perhaps the single most successful attack of its kind.

Thirty-six years had passed since I first landed at that airport, in a shuddering blunt-nosed Dakota. The aerodrome, as it was then spoken of, was a relic of an older war, in which Colombo had served as the nerve center of Lord Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command. I was nine then, a fresh entrant into that moment of childhood when we first begin to truly inhabit the world, in the particular sense of committing it to memory. I remember Colombo's red-tiled roofs, like stacks of hardback books spread open on a desk; I remember my school, Royal College, and the stairway where I first tasted blood on my lip; I remember after-school cricket matches on Layard's Road and wickets knocked over by kabaragoyas; I remember marshmallow ice cream at Elephant House and the pearly insides of mangosteens; I remember the palm trees at Hikkaduwa leaning like dancers over the golden sands; I remember Elephant's Pass and the road to Jaffna, as narrow as the clasp between a necklace and its pendant; I remember at Pollonaruwa a cobra coiled on the floor of a rest house, looking up as though in surprise at my silhouette in the doorway; I remember a train on a slope, its smoke mingling with the mists of Nuwara Eliya.

Such was the paradise from which I was abruptly torn when I arrived upon the threshold of adolescence. In the summer of 1967, when I had reached the age of eleven, I was sent away to be educated at the other end of the subcontinent, in Dehradun, which was said to be one of the most picturesque places in India. But for me this sub-Himalayan valley proved to be anything but Arcadia: I found myself imprisoned in a walled city of woe, with five hundred adolescents who had been herded together to be instructed in the dark arts of harrowing their peers. That it was my parents who were the agents of my expulsion from paradise was not the least part of the bewildering pain of my banishment. It was in that sub-Himalayan purgatory that I learned what it was to recall a time of joy in wretchedness. Now, in the recollection of that emotion, I have come to recognize a commonality with many, perhaps most, Sri Lankans — indeed, with everyone who remembers what it was to live in Serendib before the Fall.

Michael Ondaatje writes:

The last Sinhala word I lost

was vatura.

The word for water.

Forest water. The water in a kiss. The tears

I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving

the first home of my life.

More water for her than any other

that fled my eyes again

this year, remembering her,

a lost almost-mother in those years

of thirsty love

No photograph of her, no meeting

since the age of eleven,

not even knowledge of her grave.

Who abandoned who, I wonder now.

These lines look back — as do I when I think of Sri Lanka — to a childhood long past. But the poem was published recently, in New York, and I doubt that it would have sounded this exact note had it been written at any other time and in any other circumstances. This is not merely a eulogy for Rosalin; it is an elegy of homecoming spoken in a voice that has been orphaned not just by the loss of an almost-mother but by history itself. It is a lament that mourns the passing of the paradise that made Rosalin possible.

At the other end of the subcontinent lies another land devastated by the twin terrors of armed insurgency and state repression: Kashmir, of which an emperor famously said:

If there is a paradise on earth,

It is this, it is this, it is this.

In the mid-1990s, at about the same time that Michael Ondaatje was writing his elegy to Rosalin, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali was writing his great poem "The Last Saffron." The poem begins:

I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,

and the shadowed routine of each vein

will almost be news, the blood censored,

for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain

The poem ends with these verses:

Yes, I remember it,

the day I'll die, I broadcast the crimson,

so long ago of that sky, its spread air,

its rushing dyes, and a piece of earth

bleeding, apart from the shore, as we went

on the day I'll die, past the guards, and he,

keeper of the world's last saffron, rowed me

on an island the size of a grave. On

two yards he rowed me into the sunset,

past all pain. On everyone's lips was news

of my death but only that beloved couplet,

broken, on his:

"If there is a paradise on earth,

It is this, it is this, it is this."

If the twin terrors of insurgency and repression could be said to have engendered any single literary leitmotif, it is surely the narrative of the loss of paradise. Nowhere is this story more precisely chronicled than in Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 novel, Funny Boy. The novel is set in Colombo, in the turmoil of the early 1980s, when long-simmering tensions between Sri Lanka's Sinhala-dominated government and the minority Tamil population exploded into a savagely violent conflict. The narrator is a teenage boy from a wealthy Tamil family, and the novel's final chapter recounts the events of July 1983, when a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan army triggered massive reprisals against the Tamils of Colombo.

In Funny Boy the destruction of paradise is assigned precise dates and an exact span of time: it starts at 9:30 A.M. on July 25, 1983. It is only a few hours since the novel's teenage narrator and his family have learned that "there [is] trouble in Colombo": the night before, a mob has gone wild after a funeral for thirteen slain soldiers and many Tamil houses have been burned. At 9:30 A.M. the family begins to ready itself for a hasty departure from its own house. "We are supposed to bring a few clothes and one other thing that is important to us. I can't decide which thing to take." But the boy's mother has already decided; not the least of her provisions for the uncertainties of the future is the preparation for the coming age of sorrow: "Amma is taking all the family albums. She says that if anything happens they will remind us of happier days."

All through the day, the family waits in the once-beloved home that has now become a prison. As the hours pass, the narrator seeks consolation in his journal, recording rumors and reports. He hears that the government has distributed electoral lists to help the mobs locate Tamil homes; he is hugely relieved when he is told that a curfew has been declared, and is therefore doubly dismayed to learn that the announcement has made no difference, the mob is still on the rampage. He hears of the police and army watching in silent indifference as a Tamil family is burned alive in a car. At 11:30 P.M. the boy writes: "The waiting is terrible. I wish the mob would come so that this dreadful waiting would end."

The next entry is written a little more than half a day later, but in that brief span of time the world has become a different place. Nothing will ever be the same again; the boy's childhood has become a place apart. This is the moment when history, the connection between time past and time ahead, has ended and memory has become an island that is severed forever from the present and the future. "July 26, 12:30 P.M.: I have just read my last entry and it seems unbelievable that only thirteen hours ago I was sitting on my bed writing in this journal. A year seems to have passed since that time. Our lives have completely changed. I try and try to make sense of it, but it just won't work."

What has happened is this: the long wait has come to an end soon after the writing of the penultimate journal entry. On hearing the chants of an approaching mob, the family has taken refuge in a Sinhala neighbor's house. Huddled in a storeroom, they have listened as their house is burned to the ground.

The morning after, they have looked over the remains of the house. The sight has made little impression; it is almost incomprehensible. The boy notes that his vinyl records have dissolved into black puddles, that the furniture has cracked open to reveal the whiteness of common wood. "I observed all this with not a trace of remorse, not a touch of sorrow for the loss and destruction around me. Even now I feel no sorrow. I try to remind myself that the house is destroyed, that we will never live in it again, but my heart refuses to understand this." It is only later, on being told of the destruction of his grandparents' home, that he is able to grieve: "I thought about childhood spend-the-days and all the good times we had there. These thoughts made me cry. I couldn't cry for my own house, but it was easy to grieve for my grandparents' house." A precocious prescience has led the boy to grasp the precise nature of his grief: he ascribes it not to the immediacy of his own experience but to the memory of better times — to that act of remembrance than which, as Dante's Francesca da Rimini tells us, there is "no greater sorrow": that is to say, in the recollection of better times.

This depiction of the violence of 1983—and to my mind Funny Boy is one of the most powerful and moving accounts of those events — was published in 1994 in Canada, where Shyam Selvadu-rai's family had settled after leaving Sri Lanka. I draw attention to this only to underscore two facts: that Funny Boy was written by a recent immigrant to North America and that it is an act of recollection that tells the story of a departure. These facts appear unremarkable, yet there is to my mind a puzzle here, and it lies in this: an immigrant's story is usually a narrative of arrival, not departure. And nowhere is this more true than in North America.

North America is famously peopled by immigrants, and nowhere else on earth is the experience of immigration so richly figured as it is here: in popular culture, literature, film, and indeed every aspect of public life. In photography, the emblematic image of this experience is that of a family of immigrants standing on the deck of the ship that has brought them across the Atlantic. In these pictures the immigrants' eyes are always turned in the direction of the waiting shore, toward the Statue of Liberty and the towers of the shining city ahead. Many of these immigrants have suffered terrible hardships, yet we would search in vain for similarly powerful images taken at the hour when they boarded the ship: that moment holds only passing interest in this story. This is because, classically, narratives of immigration to North America are stories of arrival, not departure, stories of suffering but not sorrow or regret; they are stories of hope, founded on a belief in the redemptive power of the land ahead. The vitality of these stories derives in no small part from the obvious parallels with the Biblical story of the Promised Land, which is, of course, equally a story of hope and of arrival. Those who followed Moses out of Egypt did not linger to cast glances of melancholy longing upon the Nile. They looked only ahead; their memory of Egypt was of unmitigated suffering; there were no times of joy there to be recalled in wretchedness. The mark of an exodus lies in the direction of these eyes, looking ahead toward the far shore, confident in the belief that the bonds of community will not perish in the process of migration. But this is not the direction in which Selvadurai's narrator has turned his gaze. Here is the novel's penultimate sentence: "When I reached the top of the road, I couldn't prevent myself from turning back to look at the house one last time." And this is how he ends his story, with the narrator looking back, through the rain, at the charred remains of a home that was once filled with happiness.

It is the direction of the gaze that identifies this as a story not of an exodus but of a dispersal, the story of an irrevocable sundering of the dual bonds that tie members of a community to each other and to other like communities. In the experience of an exodus there is an unspoken ambiguity: the sufferings of displacement are tinged with the hope of arrival and the opening of new vistas in the future. A dispersal offers no such consolation: the pain that haunts it is not that of remembered oppression; it is rather that particular species of pain that comes from the knowledge that the oppressor and the oppressed were once brothers. It is this species of pain, exactly, that runs so poignantly through the literature that resulted from the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. We know, from that line of Boethius which Dante was later to give to Francesca da Rimini, that among fortune's many adversities, the most unhappy kind is to nurture the memory of having once been happy.

This is where recollection turns its back on history, for it is the burden of history to make sense of the past, while the memory of dispersal is haunted always by the essential inexplicability of what has come to pass; by the knowledge that there was nothing inevitable, nothing predestined about what has happened; that far from being primordial, the enmities that have led to the sufferings of the present are new and unaccountable; that there was a time once when neither protagonist saw the other as an adversary — a time that will be irrevocably lost with the dissolution of the history that made it possible for many parts to be a whole.

That which I, in the fever of my pride, am struggling to put into words has been much better said in Agha Shahid Ali's poem "Farewell":

At a certain point I lost track of you.

You needed me. You needed to perfect me:

In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.

Your history gets in the way of my memory.

I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.

I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.

Your memory gets in the way of my memory…

There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.

I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,

what would not have been possible in the world?

There is nothing arbitrary, then, about the ending of Selvadu-rai's novel — the story ends here because it must. To carry it any further would be to link it to the present and the future, to imply the possibility of a consolation. And this, of course, the writer could not do, for the reason that there is no greater sorrow than the recalling of times of joy is precisely that this is a grief beyond consolation.

In 1983, at the time of the Colombo riots, I was hard at work on my first novel, The Circle of Reason. I was living in New Delhi, where I had succeeded in finding a minor appointment at Delhi University. Some of my colleagues and mentors at the university — Veena Das and Ashish Nandy, for example — had close connections with human rights activists in Sri Lanka. They were thus able to acquire many of the documents, records, and testimonies that were produced by Sri Lankan researchers. Newspaper accounts of the riots were shocking enough, but the picture that emerged from these independent reports was more menacing still. They left no doubt that some parts of the machinery of state had been used to target a minority population. I don't remember whether we asked ourselves what would happen if this pattern were to spread through the subcontinent. The question was perhaps too grim to pose in an India that was beset by insurgency, calamity, and terror.

A year later, with Indira Gandhi's assassination, the tide crested on our own doorsteps. I remember that day graphically: I remember taking the bus across Delhi; I remember the eerie silence in the university, I remember the evil that gleamed in the eyes of the thugs who began to attack Sikhs wherever they could find them. I have written about these events in detail elsewhere (see "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi," [>]) and will limit myself here to noting only the close parallels between the patterns of violence in Colombo in 1983 and in New Delhi in 1984. In both instances, inexcusable crimes were committed by insurgent groups in the name of freedom; in both cases, the information-gathering function of government was turned to the sinister purpose of targeting minority populations; in both there were clear instances of collusion between officials and criminals.

Through the riots and their aftermath, I, like many of my friends and colleagues, worked with a citizens' relief organization called the Nagarik Ekta Manch. After the immediate crisis was over I returned to the manuscript I was working on. This novel, The Circle of Reason, was the story of a journey, and its central section told the story of a group of immigrants — South Asian and Middle Eastern — living in a fictitious oil-rich sheikdom in the Gulf. Looking back today, it strikes me that The Circle of Reason could, within the parameters that I have used here, be identified as an exodus novel, a story of migration in the classic sense of having its gaze turned firmly toward the future. The book ended with the words "Hope is the beginning."

I was working on the last part of the book in 1984 when the riots broke out. After the violence it was a struggle to bring the manuscript to a conclusion: my attention had turned away from it. Unlike Shyam Selvadurai, unlike the Sikhs of New Delhi, I was not in the position of a victim during the riots of 1984. But the violence had the effect of bringing to the surface of my memory events from my own childhood when I had indeed been in a similar situation.

Somehow I did manage to finish The Circle of Reason, and soon afterward I started the novel that would eventually be published as The Shadow Lines. When I began to work on the manuscript, I found that the book was following a pattern of growth that was exactly the opposite of its predecessor's. The Circle of Reason had grown upward, like a sapling rising from the soil of my immediate experience; The Shadow Lines had its opening planted in the present, but it grew downward, into the soil, like a root system straining to find a source of nourishment.

It was in this process that I came to examine the ways in which my own life had been affected by civil violence. I remembered stories my mother had told me about the great Calcutta killing of 1946; I remembered my uncles' stories of anti-Indian riots in Rangoon in 1930 and 1938. At the heart of the book, however, was an event that had occurred in Dhaka in 1964, the year before my family moved to Colombo; in the unlit depths of my memory there stirred a recollection of a night when our house, flooded with refugees, was besieged by an angry mob. I had not thought of this event in decades, but after 1984 it began to haunt me: I was astonished by how vivid my memories were and how fully I could access them once I had given myself permission to do so. But my memories had no context; I had no way of knowing what had happened, whether it was an isolated incident, particular to the neighborhood we were living in, or whether it had implications beyond. I decided to find out what had happened. I went to libraries and sifted through hundreds of newspapers, and in the end, through perseverance, luck, and guesswork, I did find out what had happened. The riots of my memory were not a local affair: they had engulfed much of the subcontinent. The violence had been set in motion by the reported theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar. Although Kashmir was unaffected, other parts of the subcontinent had gone up in flames. The rioting had continued for the better part of a week, in India as well as the two wings of Pakistan.

The process by which I came to learn of this was itself to become a pivotal part of the narrative of The Shadow Lines. While searching for evidence of the riots, I came across dozens of books about the Indo-Chinese war of 1962. This was an event that had evidently created a torrent of public discourse. Yet the bare fact is that this war was fought in a remote patch of terrain, far removed from major population centers, and it had few repercussions outside the immediate area. The riots of 1964, in contrast, had affected many major cities and had caused extensive civilian casualties. Yet there was not a single book devoted to this event. A cursory glance at a library's bookshelves was enough to establish that in historical memory, a small war counts for much more than a major outbreak of civil violence. While the riots were under way, they had received extensive and detailed coverage. Yet once contained, they had vanished instantly, both from public memory and from the discourse of history. Why was this so? Why is it that civil violence seems to occur in parallel time, as though it were outside history? Why is it that we can look back on these events in sorrow and outrage and yet be incapable of divining any lasting solutions or any portents for the future?

Inasmuch as I addressed these conundrums in The Shadow Lines, it was in these words:

Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle that I am destined to lose — have already lost — for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of a ruthless state — nothing like that: no barbed wire, no checkpoints to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words — that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are not words.

The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings — so it follows inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world… where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated — because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality.

I can still feel the sorrow and outrage that provoked these words — emotions that owed much more to the events of 1984 than to my memories of 1964. Just as terrible as the violence itself was the thought that so many lives had been expended for nothing, that this terrible weight of suffering had created no discernibly new trajectory in the history or politics of the region. When we grieve for the appalling loss of life in World War II, our sorrow is not compounded by the thought that the war has changed nothing: we know that it has changed the world in very significant ways, has created a new epoch. But in the violence of 1984—to take just one example — it was impossible to see any such portents. It was hard to see how a further partitioning of the subcontinent could provide a solution; on the contrary, it would create only a new set of minorities and new oppressions. In effect, it would amount only to a recasting of the problem itself, in a different form. In the absence of such meanings, there seemed to be no means of representing these events except in outrage and in sorrow.

It follows then that the reason that I — and many others who have written of such events — are compelled to look back in sorrow is that we cannot look ahead. It is as though the events of the immediate past have made the future even more obscure than it is usually acknowledged to be. Now, close on two decades later, I find myself asking, Why is this so? Why was it that in the 1980s, history itself seemed to stumble and come to a standstill?

The past, as Faulkner famously said, is not over; in fact, the past is not even the past. One of the paradoxes of history is that it is impossible to draw a chart of the past without imagining a map of the present and the future. History, in other words, is never innocent of teleologies, implicit or otherwise. Ranajit Guha, in a recent lecture on Hegel and the writing of history in South Asia, says, "It is the state which first supplies a content, which not only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it." In other words, the actions of the state provide that essential element of continuity that makes time, as a collective experience, thinkable, by linking the past, the present, and the future. The state as thus conceived is not merely an apparatus of rule but "a conscious, ethical institution," an instrument designed to conquer the "unhistorical power of time." That is, since the nineteenth century, and perhaps even earlier, it is the state that has provided the grid on which history is mapped.

It was perhaps this politically insignificant but epistemologically indispensable aspect of time's continuity that was most vitally damaged by the conflagrations of the 1980s. Even before then, it had often been suspected that elements of the state's machinery had been colluding in the production of communal violence; after the violence of the eighties, this became established as a fact. It became evident that certain parts of the state had been absorbed by — had indeed become sponsors of — criminal violence. No longer could the state be seen as a protagonist in its own right. It is for this reason that I have used the self-contradictory phrase "civil violence" here, in preference to other, more commonly used terms: because these events signaled the collapse of the familiar categories of "state" and "civil society."

The flames created by our recent past are so plentiful that only poets noticed the unsung death of a teleology. "Everything is finished, nothing remains," writes Agha Shahid Ali of a poet who returns to Kashmir in search of the keeper of a destroyed minaret.

"Nothing will remain, everything's finished,"

I see his voice again: "This is a shrine

of words. You'll find your letters to me. And mine

to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished

envelopes."…

This is an archive. I've found the remains

of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.

Buried within the poet's "shrine of words" lies a map: a chart "of longings without limit." It is not the fall of the minaret but the loss of the map that is the true catastrophe. It is this loss that evokes the words "Nothing will remain, everything's finished."

Shahid's is not the only lost map. In "The Story," Michael Ondaatje invokes another.

For his first forty days a child

is given dreams of previous lives,

journeys, winding paths,

a hundred small lessons

and then the past is erased.

Some are born screaming,

some full of introspective wandering

into the past — that bus ride in winter,

the sudden arrival within

a new city in the dark.

And those departures from family bonds

leaving what was lost and needed.

So the child's face is a lake

of fast moving clouds and emotions.

A last chance for the clear history of the self.

All our mothers and grandparents here,

our dismantled childhoods

in the buildings of the past.

Some great forty-day daydream

before we bury the maps.

The old maps are gone, and two of the finest poets of our time, Michael Ondaatje and Agha Shahid Ali, exiles from twinned Edens, have borne witness to their loss; gone are Michael's "forty-day daydream" and Shahid's "longings without limit." Writers who look back, in the wake of that loss, can only build shrines to that past. And yet the mystery of the sorrow entombed in their work is that their grief is not just for a time remembered: they grieve also for the loss of the map that made the future thinkable.

Is there then another map to replace those that have been buried in the rubble of our daydreams? Once, six years ago, I thought I had a glimpse of one: this is how it came about. I had spent a sleepless night at a guerrilla camp in the thickly forested mountains of the Burma-Thailand border. The Myanmar army was entrenched a few miles away, fighting a fierce engagement with Karenni insurgents. My hosts had handed me a makeshift pillow, of a book wrapped in a towel. The bundle came undone at some point during the night and I discovered, switching on my flashlight, that the book was called The Transformation of War. It was written by a military historian called Martin Van Creveld. I began to read and was still reading hours later. The next day, I wrote in my diary:

I am appalled by Van Creveld's vision of the future, yet over here, it makes more sense than anything I have read about this kind of conflict. Van Creveld is arguing that modern weaponry has been rendered obsolete by its very effectiveness. The destructiveness of these weapons is such as to make conventional military-based conflict impossible: hence fighting will increasingly take the form of low-intensity conflict, based upon "close intermingling with the enemy." Civilians will be in the front lines of the conflict; they will be the focus of attack and conventional distinctions between army, state, and civil society will break down. Groups such as private mercenary bands commanded by warlords and even commercial organs will become the main combatants: "future war-making entities will probably resemble the Assassins, the group which, motivated by religion and allegedly supporting itself on drugs, terrorized the Middle East for… centuries.

Till then I had taken for granted a pattern of the world that divided the globe between a large number of nation-states. Now suddenly it was as though a bucket had been upended on the map, making the colors run. The camp and the disputed territory around it was no longer on no man's land; it was a reality in its own right, one that extended in an unbroken swath through northern Burma and northeast India to western China and Kashmir, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. In this immense stretch of territory, Van Creveld's vision was not just one of many possible forks in the road: it was a turn already taken. Nor could I any longer regard Myanmar and its brutally despotic regime as an aberration, a holdover from a preempted past. I was forced to ask myself whether that country might not hold some portents for the future. Burma is a country to which terrorism and insurgency came exceptionally early: within a few months of independence, in 1948, the Rangoon government was besieged by sixteen rebellions. Accounts of life in Burma in the 1950s are replete with tales of derailed trains, bombs in stations, sudden ambushes, and the like. Within a few years civil society collapsed, and there followed an absolute militarization of political life. The results are well known. That this could happen elsewhere did not seem improbable.

Not unaware of the world's discontents, I took Van Creveld's vision seriously and tried to incorporate his warnings into my everyday life. I made a point, for example, of not trying to shield my children from news of violence and terror. Yet no matter how carefully we prepare ourselves for the future, the reality is always far in excess of our imaginings.

On the morning of September 11, I was sitting at my desk in my house in Brooklyn when my wife called from her office in mid-town Manhattan to tell me about the attacks on the World Trade Center. My ten-year-old daughter, Lila, was at school a couple of miles away, and my eight-year-old son was at home: this was to have been his first day in a new school, and I was scheduled to take him there later that morning. But instead we rushed out together to fetch Lila home from her school in Brooklyn Heights.

Downtown Brooklyn was choked with people, and in the distance we saw a plume of dust rising into the clear blue sky, darkening the horizon like a thundercloud. Everyone was heading away from the river; only the two of us seemed to be walking toward the darkness in the distance. I held my son's hand and walked as fast as I could. On arriving in Brooklyn Heights, we found Lila in the basement of her school. Her eyes were bright, and she was eager to tell me what had happened. "Where were you?" she said. "I saw it all. From the window of our history class we had a clear view."

We stepped out and joined the great wave of dust-caked evacuees that was pouring over the Brooklyn Bridge. I held my children's hands and tried to think of words of reassurance, something that would reattach the moorings that had come undone that morning and restore their sense of safety. But words are not to be had for the asking, and I could think of none.

Since then I have come to recognize that there is very little I can say to broaden my children's understanding of what they saw that day. As a writer I have tried to live by the credo that nothing human should be alien to me. Yet my imagination stops short as I try to think of the human realities of what it must mean to plan a collective suicide over a span of years or to stand in a check-in line with people whose murder has already been decided on; of what it takes to speak of love on a cell phone moments before one's death or to reach for a stranger's hand as one leaps from the topmost floor of a skyscraper. These are new dimensions of human experience, and I realize that they will become a part of the generational gap that separates me from my children: their imagining of the world will be different from mine, and that very difference will create a new reality. From my own childhood I remember a day when I stared at a newspaper, mesmerized by a picture of a Buddhist monk burning at a crossroads in Saigon. At that time, this too represented a new addition to the armory of human motivation: this was the moment that inaugurated the era of political suicide in the modern world. Since then such suicides have become so commonplace as often to go unreported. They have become a part of the unseen foundations of our awareness, present but unnoticed, like the earth beneath a basement.

The thickening crust of our awareness is both a sign and a reminder of our unwitting complicity in the evolution of violence: if that which mesmerized us yesterday ceases to interest us today, then it follows that the act which will next claim our attention will be even more horrific, even more resistant to yesterday's imagination, than the last. The horror of these acts is thus exactly calibrated to the indifference upon which they are inflicted. Their purpose is not warlike, in the sense of achieving specific ends through violence; their purpose is horror itself.

In one of its aspects terror represents an epistemic violence, a radical interruption in the procedures and protocols that give the world a semblance of comprehensibility. This is why it causes not just fear and anger but also long-lasting confusion and utterly disproportionate panic; it tears apart the stories through which individuals link their lives to a collective past and present. Everyday life would be impossible if we did not act upon certain assumptions about the future, near and distant — about the train we will catch tomorrow as well as the money we pay into our pensions. Not the least of the terror of a moment such as that of September 11 is that it reveals the future to be truly what it is: unknown, unpredictable, and utterly inscrutable. It is this epistemic upheaval that Michael Ondaatje and Agha Shahid Ali point to when they mourn the maps of our longings and our forty-day daydreams: the pure intuition of poetry had led them to an awareness of this loss long before the world awakened to the knowledge that "nothing will be the same again."

On October 11, a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center, The New Yorker organized an evening of readings to raise money for the victims. I was one of those invited to read, and I chose to read two of Shahid's poems. Several of the other readers chose texts that hearkened back to the wars of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill on World War I; Remarque on the trenches of the western front; Auden on the declaration of war in September 1939. When it was my turn to read, I was struck by the sharpness of the contrast between Shahid's voice and those of the poets of the last century; by the vividness of emotion; by the almost palpable terror that comes of having looked into the obscurity of a time that will not permit itself to be mapped with the measures of the past. It was as though news of times to come had been carried to the capital of the world by a messenger from a half-forgotten hinterland. Time had turned on itself: the backward had preceded the advanced; the periphery had visited the present before the center; the "half-made" world had become the diviner of the fully formed.

Yet the message itself was neither a presaging nor a prediction; it lay merely in the acknowledgment of the loss of a map. But to be aware of the death of a teleology is not to know of what will take its place. The truth is that on the morning of September 11, I had nothing to say to my children that had not been said in Michael Ondaatje's poem "The Story":

With all the swerves of history

I cannot imagine your future…

I no longer guess a future.

And do not know how we end

nor where.

Though I know a story about maps, for you.